Open Access in Higher Education
In the context of higher education, Open Access refers to freely available scholarly material. This material can be accessed, for free, by anyone with an internet connection. Most scholarly material, such as journal articles and monographs, are only available by means of license. These licenses are extremely prohibitive. In fact, in a context wherein funding cuts to higher education are to be expected, these lincenses have become prohibitively expensive for institutions at all levels.
Beyond the financial element of Open Access, OA also refers to author rights and reuse permissions. Generally, scholars that choose to publish with non-OA journals sign extremely strict copyright agreements. In effect, authors sign away their rights to a work, including the ability to republish or reprint. This gives publishers control of the scholarly publishing system. Given that most scholarship in higher education is funded in one way or another by tax dollars, we think this is problematic.
